● 01.07.10

● Links 7/1/2010: GNU/Linux Gains Among Key OEMs

Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Where are the accolades for Linux?

• A review of the company that made the Linux computer graphics happen, known as WETA Digital (Wellington, New Zealand, a Peter Jackson spin off company), is notoriously absent from the articles.

• The underlying operating system, Linux RHEL (hundreds of HP blade servers running as Linux cluster) is also utterly absent from even the more technical news sources.

• In this episode: Google releases the Nexus One and Mark Shuttleworth has announced he’s going to relinquish control of Canonical. Freescale unveils a Linux touch tablet and we ask whether 2010 could really, honestly, be the year of Linux on the desktop.

• This is the Monet Frame-puter booting Ubuntu 9.10

Desktop

• If you can do all you want and be all you can be and have the battery last all day using ARM and GNU/Linux, is there really any need to prop up the monopoly any longer? This could be an excellent year, again.

• I have to wonder at the price of this particular gadget, though. How can Lenovo justify a premium price for the world’s least expensive processor and OS??? It could be the first-to-market price bulge. That could make sense, but why did they miss the Christmas season? Was the product just not ready on time or the deals not made? Perhaps folks who value mobile phones will pay a price for this. I know some people pay many hundreds of dollars for phones that are not this smart. I expect later devices will share the upswell of ARM and eventually compete by lowering prices. It’s all good.

• The Lenovo Skylight is looking to do two things: Be your constant companion and be always on. Lenovo has put their own custom version of Linux on it, along with their own custom GUI. The experience is built to provide seamless shuffling between videos, web pages, multimedia, and work space. No one has gotten their hands on it yet, but after CES 2010, I’m sure there will be a considerable buzz whether this new gadget is worthy. It’s an interesting offering from Lenovo, who’s been trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the computer manufacturing masses. If successful, it could mean big things for their custom OS and their new product. Will it be a Lenovo-only distro, or will they unleash it on the masses? More on this latter…

• Dell is still shipping their Mini 10V’s with Ubuntu Linux, and that’s good news for the Linux world. Since netbook hardware can be hit-or-miss with big name Linux distros, it’s nice to see Dell officially supporting the product. Although the reception to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has so-so, it’s still a move in Linux direction.

• The new HP Mini 210 is working on the Windows platform still, and aims to provide an easy to use experience. But for some reason HP has abandoned the Linux model. Once upon a time, they had a fancy GUI for their Linux distro, but it never went anywhere. So now HP is sticking with what they know. Will the success of Windows 7 differentiate themselves?

• There are two possibilities, either you create a door for yourself, or if you see a door, then just open it and walk in. We will talk about the door thing later, first tell me: what do you use for your computing? Did I hear Microsoft Windows? GNU/Linux? Some might be using Apple Mac as well.

• Windows is passe nobody seems to be talking about it any more. Except for Microsoft, and even they may shy away if you say something that sounds similar to ‘Vista’. Now, the rage is Mac and GNU/Linux.

• Apple Mac has increased its share in the market post Vista release. The market was there and Vista disappointed people. Windows 7 is nothing, but Microsoft’s re-polished Vista promises. GNU/Linux is fighting but, it has more yards to cover.

• Apple’s long-trailed tablet computer had better be good. Semiconductor maker Freescale will this week announce the outline of a cheap rival device it hopes will be adopted by computer makers to boost its in-house chip technology.

• The concept is not something people will be able to buy immediately, but will be shown in the form of a reference design, a sort of blueprint for other companies to adopt as they see fit. But it appears to have been thought through and there is plenty in it to worry Apple as it ponders marketing for its own tablet system, rumoured to cost as much as $1,000 a pop.

• While I enjoy mocking Microsoft’s Jabba-ware, Linux is an offender as well. Too many Linux devs are all jazzed about GUIs and flashy junk, and ignoring or even trying to do away with the CLI. Dear ones, when your GUIs are as fast and efficient as the CLI, then I will quit crabbing at you. Where ever did you get the idea that I want to waste my life wading through poorly-organized menus, and waiting for lardy slow-ware to actually do something when I click, when I can accomplish the same task in one second on the command line?

• So there is my computing wish for the new decade: I want something to happen when I click.

• No problem to install Mandriva 2010.0 on this new (for me !) HP mini 110. However, at reboot time, blocked on udev.

• I found a similar bug report for another system that gave me the hint: Add ssb.blacklist=1 at boot prompt. And indeed it did the trick

• Microsoft continues to sell consumers an operating system that needs anti-virus protection.

• It’s not like they keep it a secret: if you install Windows 7, there’s three things splashed up on the screen for users towards the end of the process: configure the OS, activate the OS, and get anti-virus software.

• To me, there’s something fundamentally wrong with knowingly send out a piece of software that’s vulnerable–so vulnerable that you have to tell users your product is unsafe until they get third-party protection.

• [...]

• With the wave of new Linux-based smartbooks, netbooks, and phones hitting the market, there are still critics who complain about an alleged lack of features in Linux. Even if this notion were accurate, and I am very sure it’s not, let me put the question to them: why would you rather have the latest gadget installed on your system as opposed to personal data security?

• As a group, computer and electronics users need to reset their priorities. It’s not about the nifty toys and Easter eggs you can find in Windows. It’s about what personal information malicious users can find in your Windows.

Applications

• After two years of work, the GCompris development team is happy to share with you the release of the version 9.0.

• GCompris is almost 10 years old and it required some deep code restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it easier to enhance, maintain and distribute.

• Its Web site states that OpenMovieEditor has been “… designed for basic movie making capabilities… [and] to be powerful enough for the amateur movie artist, yet easy to use”. In fact I found OpenMovieEditor to be a surprisingly capable NLE, modest in its stated goals yet possessing some features not commonly found in Linux NLEs.

• Instant Messaging client ‘Emesene’ slipped a new release out on Monday but what’s new in it?

• Aside from bug fixes all round – which even the team themselves admit “we’re too lazy to write ‘em all” – there are a few GUI changes that you’ll likely come across…

• Iron Browser is an enhanced version of the excellent Google Chrome browser. Google, however, has been criticized heavily by the data protection specialists for the fact that it creates a unique user ID for each of its Chrome user and sends entries to Google to generate suggestions. Iron Browser offers same wonderful browser experience as it is build on the Chome’s source and offers and looks the same. But it protects your privacy.

Instructionals

• This is again a wonderful demonstration of the flexibility of GNU/Linux. This technique respects the EULA of that other OS in that any number of XP machines can connect to the GNU/Linux server without exceeding the 5 or 10 access limit an XP machine has.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• I’d like to talk about KDM and Plasma combining forces. Well, since I always need to be coding something, regardless of whether or not I have any free-time, I have (begun to plan out and create(began today), a Plasma frontend for our login manager, kdm. Before anyone begins shaking their fists in the air and such, I must stress this…The Plasma frontend will be *optional*. So if you dislike Plasma *that* much for some reason or are close-minded (perhaps mutually inclusive?): the regular, currently used frontend can be used.

• Industry Linux overview by Linux experts Aaron J. Seigo, Community leader at the KDE Foundation and Arnaud Laprévote, CTO Chief Technology Officer at Mandriva Linux. They analyse the influence of Linux on the Laptop industry with the advent of the Netbooks.

• - Alt+F3 will bring up the menu for right clicking on the title bar of the Konsole’s window.

• - Right clicking on the Desktop area where the Konsole lies will not present the Desktop menu but the menu for right clicking in the terminal.

• - An option to hide the Konsole Window when hitting Alt+Tab doesn’t seem to exist. If you have a workaround on this do tell.

• Hot on the heels of my Phonon PulseAudio integration, here is another set of patches for kdemultimedia that adds PulseAudio support to KMix \o/

• Here’s the next instalment of the graphics performance blog series. We’ll begin by looking at some background about how OpenGL and QPainter work. We’ll then dive into how the two are married together in OpenGL 2 Paint Engine and finish off with some advice about how to get the best out of the engine. Enjoy!

GNOME Desktop

• Just in time for the holidays, GNOME received an awesome surprise!

• While many people probably listed computers in their letter to Santa, I bet not many of them got one like this.

• GNOME’s Summer outreach program and FSF’s LibrePlanet conference highlight women’s participation in free software

• Today, the FSF announced the dates for the 2010 LibrePlanet event, a conference for the free software community that expresses a vision for solidarity amongst developers, activists and users who are working towards the shared goal of a fully free software world–a world without reliance on proprietary software.

• Compare this gentleman’s reflection and consideration of RMS’ points with the enthusiastic ignorance we saw earlier on the very same point.

• Examples like this are exactly why I have come to the conclusion that the noisy people that disagree with RMS (and, by extension, the “Free Software” concept) fall into one of two camps: ignorant or malicious.

Distributions

New Releases

• After the Christmas release of the new KahelOS Desktop installers 12-25-2009, there’s no stopping this citrusy fresh Linux Distribution.

Red Hat Family

• SmarTrend identified an Uptrend for Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) on November 17, 2009 at $28.67. In approximately 1 month, Red Hat has returned 9.2% as of today’s recent price of $31.30.

Debian Family

• A few people have been asking why IBM is promoting Ubuntu at the Young Scientist Exhibition when it is not an IBM product. In fact there are a number of good reasons:

• 1. IBM supports the concept of freedom and we would hate to think that students (or anyone) would feel locked in to using a particular brand of proprietary software just because it came with the PC when they bought it. Click here to view Bob Stutor explain in detail why IBM cares about software freedom.

• 2. Ubuntu provides an excellent quality stable desktop operating system for free, so we don’t want to see people wasting valuable money on purchasing licenses for software when they don’t have to

• 3. We think that Ubuntu is cool and we think that the students attending the exhibition will agree when they see for themselves.

• 4. IBM employees use Ubuntu internally for their work and IBM also partners with a Canonical and Verde to provide the Ubuntu based IBM Client for Smart Work.

• after some discussion in the MIR team and on ubuntu-devel@ [1], we simplified the Main Inclusion Request process to require much less bureaucracy.

• What we really want is reporters to go through the checklist and discuss the violations of the MIR requirement standards in the bug report with the MIR team, not write lengthy wiki pages with boilerplate text (especially not for trivial packages like perl bindings).

• One of the nicest features of Pardus is the Kaptan application. What Kaptan is is a first-time, welcome application that gives a user the opportunity to customize a fresh installation of the distro. It can also be called up at any time after installation. mintWelcome, Linux Mint’s welcome application, is an attempt at that, but it does not offer the same features that you’ll find on Kaptan. In addition to the list of items on mintWelcome, here are three that I’ll love to see added:

• * Customize your desktop * Enable Network Time Protocol * Enable Gufw, the graphical firewall manager

Devices/Embedded

• Broadcom announced that it has ported Android and Windows CE to a ARM-based CPU described as “a PND [personal navigation device] on a chip.” The BCM4760 includes a GPS receiver and baseband, an ARM11 processor, a touchscreen controller, and an OpenGL ES 1.1/OpenVG 2.0-compliant graphics processor, the company says.

• ZiiLabs announced an HD-ready media hub reference design incorporating its 1GHZ, ARM Cortex-A8-based ZMS-08 system-on-chip (SoC). The Zii SiVo Digital Home Platform provides 1080p Blu-ray quality HDTV and 3D graphics UI for low-power connected home devices, and offers a development kit for Android or ZiiLabs’ Plaszma Linux stack.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s data center hosts some of the Linux community’s heaviest hitting projects including the Linux Master Kernel and the Linux Foundation. It is also the primary location for the Apache Software Foundation and Drupal, open source content management software. The lab, aka OSUOSL, also hosted the core infrastructure for Mozilla’s Firefox project, and currently host’s six of Google’s servers.

Mozilla

• It’s been a long time coming but Mozilla has finally released Firefox 3.6 RC1. The first build is now ready to download from Mozilla’s FTP servers and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

• The Flock developers have released version 2.5.6 of their social web browser based on Firefox 3, addressing several security issues. Flock is a popular cross-platform browser that automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter.

Databases

• If you sell something, you don’t own it any longer. MySQL is now SUNs business. And if SUN decides to sell themselves to Oracle – it is their business. If the MySQL founders and fanboys don’t like this, they simply shouldn’t have sold MySQL to SUN in the first instance.

• What does “Help MySQL” advocate, in a nutshell? It claims that if Oracle were to merge with Sun, MySQL customers would be trapped in a market that would be pretty much controlled and captured by Oracle, both through its existing propietary databases offerings and the acquisition of MySQL. Another issue explained on the web site is that the inherent free and open source nature of MySQL will not be enough to grant effective freedoms to the market since Oracle would be the sole copyright owner of the code and trademarks.

• Is Oracle keen on MySQL because of the market control? Or is it because Oracle sees MySQL as a means to possibly defeat Microsoft’s ambitions in the database market, where its SQL Server product is used for similar purposes as MySQL?

• The only person I’ve noticed who mentioned this is Eben Moglen , a well-known legal figure in free software circles.

• But anyone who knows anything about the history of the computer industry is aware of the intense animosity between Oracle supremo Larry Ellison and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

• At the level at which these men operate, money isn’t a consideration. Power is, rubbing one’s competitor’s face in the mud is, especially when there is past animosity. Here is just one example of how much Ellison dislikes Microsoft.

Leftovers

• The two primary interface standards for storage devices are SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). Both have been around for a number of years, SATA first appearing in 2003 and SAS appearing in 2004. Also, both of them have similar throughput performance currently at 3 Gbps (SATA started at 1.5 Gbps while SAS started at 3.0 Gbps). However, lately both protocols had been showing their age, particularly with the advent of SSD (Solid State Drives). However, the committees that oversee the protocols have not been idle and have created the next generation for each protocol – 6 Gbps.

Security

• Foreign footballers face having to carry an identity card to prove who they are, it was announced today.

• Professionals from outside the EU playing in the UK will have to apply for a card when they renew their visas, the Home Office said.

Finance

• According to The New York Times, Goldman Sachs has set aside at least $16.7 billion for employee compensation in 2009, or an average of about $700,000. Goldman’s bonuses are on track to break the record they set in 2007. The firm has decided their top 30 executives will receive bonuses in long-term stock, rather than cash.

• In addition to the $10 billion that Goldman received in Treasury-issued TARP funds, the firm got $13 billion from the government’s bailout of AIG and $22 billion worth of government guarantees on its debt.

PR/AstroTurf

• Following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, many on the right have used the incident as a political football, trying to score partisan points on the issue of terrorism.

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• Because of all of the above, I have an enormously strong interest in copyright. I’ve been reading everything I could get my hands on, and based on what I’ve seen, the WIPO Internet Treaties, which are supposedly about artists rights, are instead one of the worst attacks on artists ever written.

• Ratification of these treaties, will damage Canadian artists, will damage Canadian culture, and will destroy the very things that the treaties purport to support.

• The recent Canadian legislation which ‘died on the order paper’ was a disaster. It too, in it’s attempts to enact the flawed WIPO Internet treaties, would have damaged artists badly.

• I thought the post might be one of those blog posts that reminds us how frequently everyone “technically” infringes on copyright incidentally and how this demonstrates how screwed up copyright law is. But, no, instead, this appears to be a serious “warning” claiming that most bloggers are risking the potential of $150,000 fines by using images they find online.

• Everiss simply hated the fact that Evony — the company trying to sue him — came up with a business model that involves exactly the sort of thing we like: giving stuff away for free, and coming up with more advanced reasons to buy. That still doesn’t excuse the libel claim, but Everiss does seem to have a bit of trouble understanding basic economics of digital goods. A whole bunch of you have sent in his recent rant about how many people “stole” Modern Warfare 2. It’s the sort of thing we had thought went out of style years ago, when people realized that every download wasn’t a lost sale, and there were lots of reasons that people might download other than a lack of “moral fiber.”

• In December 2009, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Lorenzo Fertitta testified at a hearing of the US House Judiciary Committee, claiming that the UFC is losing millions to online piracy. Now, in an RIAA-style escalation, the company says it will not only start suing sites, but also individual downloaders.

• Oh boy. Here’s a fun one. You had to expect that there would be more defamation lawsuits about Twitter following the first one involving Courtney Love, but this one is quite impressive, considering of all the twists and turns that must be followed. It involves some company promoting something called “The Cookie Diet” (which appears to be exactly what you would think) suing Kim Kardashian for libel. If you don’t keep up with pop culture, Kim Kardashian is one of those people famous for being famous. The details of the lawsuit, though, are somewhat complex, and it’s difficult to figure out who to side with in this trainwreck in progress (and, yes, it seems pretty likely that the whole thing is a publicity stunt for all involved, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth covering).

• Angelyne claims that the biopic, about the life of the late hip-hop star Notorious B.I.G., featured a 12-second shot of one of Angelyne’s billboards without her prior consent or authorization.

• The National Music Publishers’ Association said Tuesday that it has won its latest copyright infringement battle against the operator of an illegal free-lyric Web site.

• Here’s the backdrop: Last week I was in Toronto for the holidays, visiting family and friends, and I decided to take my four-year-old son Gabriel and two-year-old son Zev to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see works by the Group of Seven. Zev was pretty entranced by the Lawren Harris paintings — that’s him above, checking out one of Harris’ works. (I didn’t note the name of that painting; does anyone know?)

• [...]

• Ah well. My line of logic here is, I admit, rather loose and rambling. Jamie’s video-game paintings do not actually impinge on any copyright from earlier paintings; they’re using the style of a former generation of artists, not their specific content. Still, the whole thing made me think a lot about the way art builds on art — and how copyright law can actually get in the way of art appreciation.

• The strange aspect of ACTA is that we don’t have public access to the shared documents. But is access to the drafts really necessary?

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayMargaret Aranyosi, Executive Director of KITE, Inc. 002 (2004)Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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